Great Scenes in Great Movies: Alex DeLarge Dancing like Gene Kelly in 'A Clockwork Orange'

The Set-Up

Like so many great films, A Clockwork Orange is a based on the novel of the same title. Unlike so many great films, the film expands, improves and obliterates the purpose of the novel. It smashes it from existence, taking all that was worthy, interesting and worth exploring in the original text and doing it far better via the visual power of cinema.

In my ever-accurate opinion, the film is the most well constructed and well executed, most rich, most powerful, most visceral, most thrilling, most shocking, most exciting, most philosophical and, above all other things, most cinematic piece of filmmaking the human race has ever created. In fact, I will go further than that. I would happily but the film in the upper echelons of the pantheon of human achievement, taking equal footing to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Homer’s Illiad, Van Gogh’s Starry Night and, dare I say it, lovely, lovely Ludvig Van Beethoven himself.
The plot of the film is a rather simple parable. It tells the story of Alex, a teenage boy living in a dystopian society where law and order has all but broken down. By day, Alex spends his time dogging school and listening to Beethoven. At night, he and his friends cruise the streets indulging in narcotics, beating homeless people, breaking into people’s homes and casually raping women. He is the scurge of humanity and the scurge of the state and when he eventually gets caught for his actions and sent to jail, he volunteers to join a guinea pig programme whereby he will be psychologically conditioned to do good. Under this scheme, he is let back out on the streets with a physical incapacity, rather than a conscience or sense of right or wrong, to do bad things to people and we watch the outcome of these experiments as he is humiliated, tortured and made to suffer by those he has wronged. On paper, it is a rather simple examination on the nature of morality hinging on choice: that without the ability to do great evil then great good is meaningless, reducing mankind to a wholly unnatural and pointless creation (an analogy involving mechanics and some sort of fruit is springing to mind).

It is what Kubrick then does with Burgess’s story that takes it into the stratosphere of glory. The complexities and majesty of the film can largely be summed up by the presentation and interaction between Alex and the film’s pronounced visual style. The character of Alex is not just unpleasant, not a tragic anti-hero that we can all really relate to. The boy is evil: he kills, he rapes and he shows no real remorse for his actions at any point. Ever. And yet, despite all this, you are drawn to him throughout the film and find yourselves routing for the boy. From the very opening shot of the film, with the piercing stare of Malcolm McDowell, the haunting electronic score, the hypnotic voice over and the strange visuals of the Korova Milkbar, you are transfixed by the workings and world of this individual. Kubrick grabs you by the throat, forces you into Alex’s mindset and just won’t let you go through the film’s running time. This is all aided by the vivid charisma of his leading man, Malcolm McDowell, who takes his early 70s persona of the iconic youthful rebel thanks to his work with Lyndsey Anderson’s If… and uses it to construct a tour-de-force of a performance, taking command of the screen like a general. This is contrasted with a supporting cast of unknowns playing characterutered bores that you can’t possibly relate to. Alex represents all that humanity can achieve: he is wonderful, he is charming, he is deep, he is artful, he is whitty, he is dynamic, he is complex but he is also capable of doing great atrocities to others. When he is transformed into the titular Clockwork Orange, its painful to watch because a vivid specimen of humanity has been transformed into something profoundly more ugly, yet it cannot be argued that society is not better for him having become this thing.
The film never solves this dilemma either. At the end of the film, he is proclaimed cured of the technique, but not cured of his ability to be evil. In fact, we’re back to square one, as a montage of atrocities is shown to the same classical backing track that accompanies Alex’s violence before a shot of McDowell’s beaming face. Kubrick denies the mint at the end of the meal. The film doesn’t give the audience to safe and easy answers: not in that wishy washy way that modern directors mean when they say this, when in reality what they actually mean is that their films doesn’t actually have anything to really say. A Clockwork Orange has a simple message: humanity, with all its capable of, is a thing worth preserving. What it doesn’t do is simplify this issue, doesn’t make the message easy by pretending that we can all could just get a long if everyone realised what a great big spongy cake the world is. The film doesn’t use the best of us to celebrate the value of existence and life and creation, it uses the worse of us, thus make its message all the more powerful. Kubrick’s view of humanity was famously pessimistic, a pessimism I don’t share, and so to make a film celebrating the human spirit with all these complexities thrown in is rather astonishing. No, it is astonishing. Its breathtaking. Its cinema.

And that’s also important to remember, it’s a film. Its not a spoke novel, a filmed play, a narrativised work of academia: it’s a film. The message is complex and engaging because it’s a film. We see the violence plain and simple because it’s a film. There’s no option of escaping the reality of Alex, like there is in the novel, because we see plainly what he does to people. We can’t help like Alex because of his visual magnetism and the enforced magnetism of the direction. I can try to intellectualise A Clockwork Orange all I want, and plenty of others have done it a lot, lot better than me, but, ultimately, what is magnificent about is its visual splendour. Watching it for the two hours plus of its running time is like watching the birth, climax and sum of all human achievement. Its magnificent, it’s wonderful, and I think I’ll stop now and watch it again.

The Scene (08.35-13.16)

It begins at home, or at least a place called Home - an example of the brutal symbolism the film delights in quite forcefully punching the audience with throughout. An establishing shot tells this delightful information whilst the docile tones of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie fill the soundtrack. The use of classical music is important throughout this scene, as it is in all of Kubrick’s films. Just as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the music serves to remind the audience of a sense of history. Music is mankind’s achievement and legacy and just as this seemed fitting as it accompanied majestic shots of spaceships, it is fitting now. The soundtrack, as with the protagonist Alex DeLarge’s attachment to Beethoven, reminds of thecapability of humankind: about what glorious heights the individual is able to reach through creating, which are then juxtaposed with what is to follow as the scene descends into destruction. The theme of the duality of man is played out before the scene really begins in the stylistic and operatic ultra-violence we have just witnessed in the opening coda of the film and, just as the audience attempts to find some sort of rhyme or rhythm in all this madness, this particular scene arrives
Stylism immediately begins to break apart as the scene begins, the music fading away to a muted soundtrack as Alex and his droogs con their way into the home. How do they do this? By relying on the compassion of a middle-class couple as Alex pretends to have been in an accident and in need of an ambulance. Is it sickening to us that this wicked man goes to such low ebbs to break into the home of a seemingly nice couple? Well, perhaps we don’t approve, but we can hardly be appalled by it; the film won’t let us. The couple are too bland, as they speak in a highbrow drawl and act unemotionally to Alex’s tale. Their repressive actions in comparison with the vivid enjoyment of Alex and his droogs and frankly this continues as they do force their ways in, cackling like wild gorillas in mating, while the woman yelps a bit and the man does nothing.

At this point, not only is the style gone from the soundtrack, but retreats from the visuals as well. No longer is the audience treated to the framed and staged compositions the film began with. Instead, the camera becomes handheld and altogether rather messy composition of frame as characters rush in and out of shot and the action becomes difficult to decipher. In this moment, the true reality of the situation comes crashing down. This is not opera we are watching, not something composed and ornate and intricate. What we are watching is violence, and the destruction of Kubrick’s stylisation in akin to the destruction of grace that is happening before our eyes. We are not invited to watch on high as a perfectly composed masterwork is shown respectfully. Instead, we are placed in the house itself as the camera struggles to keep up and capture everything.
And so they beat up the man and they beat up the woman, until they are both bound by the gang's force and give in to whatever they are about to do to them – perhaps slightly quicker than the audience wants to accept as guilty thoughts flash through our heads that accuse them both of cowardice. Then, as we brace ourselves for an altogether unpleasant experience, Kubrick does something that no one is expecting. Rather than simply displaying the violence in all its shocking totality, he instead invites back in the legacy of cinema into the room. The soundtrack does not return but the shots do become quite elaborately framed again, albeit in a much looser and ropier sense then before, as the man and wife are placed on either side of the shot and Alex takes centre stage. It’s not quite as theatrical as before but neither is it realistic either. It’s too ornately composed to be realistic. At this point, Alex begins to sing Singin’ in the Rain, Gene Kelly’s romantic soliloquy from the classical musical. Not only does Kubrick deliberately bastardise the meaning of this song, applying it to a wholly inappropriate circumstance, he does in a way so unpleasant that it’s hard to even admit the effect it has on you. As Malcolm McDowell quite literally dances around the shot and performs his rhythmical torture and destruction, the frame gets more constructed and laboured and the camerawork more elaborate, and cinema itself presents its infectious delights to the audience. It’s not the man and woman’s suffering we’re responding to in this scene; it’s the majesty of song and dance and the charisma of Alex. Despite everything he’s doing, you can’t help but be mesmerised by it. Cinema makes the violence intoxicatingly difficult not to watch, and this gets more and more uncomfortable as the acts get worse and worse, as he cuts the woman’s top open to reveal her breasts and her husband is gagged and forced to watch as she is stripped naked entirely. What makes the scene masterful is not that it’s a difficult watch, it’s that it’s actually quite an easy watch. In some places, it’s actually quite funny. You’re in the house, in Home, and you’re enjoying yourself. This is an all together more unpleasant aspect to have to struggle - the idea that violence is in someway interesting and engaging - as your own responsibility to that which is shown is thoroughly interrogated before your eyes. Kubrick tricks you into assuming the position of a droog. It would be much easier and much more cathartic to suffer through the scene and know that you’ve suffered, as close-up shots show the husband is about to do. As Alex leans down and speaks to the man, looking directly at the audience, he asks the camera to watch closely. Buoyed by this, we prepare ourselves to grimace through this awful event to atone for our guilt. However, because he’s a genius, Kubrick simply cuts away.

The scene sums up much of what is just brilliant about the film. It is shocking, it is violent but it is also profoundly graceful. The image has never been more complex and full as when composed by Stanley Kubrick and never so fulfilling as it is in A Clockwork Orange. Viddy well my brothers. Viddy well.

Announcing a Change in Format via Meta-Texual Musings

WARNING: This entry begins with a quotation from a literary critic whose work I’ve needed to read a lot recently. I make little apologies for this, as far as I’m concerned I am happy to let pretension ring out from the highest mountaintop. However, for those with perhaps a more grounded mind, I make this deal: If you’ll bear with me as I get all serious and pompous, I promise to end with a quotation from a Pixar movie. Hopefully then the dualities of culture with be appeased.

Tzvetan Todorov wrote some words in the early seventies about the role of the critic in relation to literature. He stated that, before anything can be analysed about literature, it is important to always remember that: “When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature.”
I think this quite poetically sums up some issues I’ve been struggling with recently as I tried once again to grind out another entry for this blog. It chimes with me because it seems they confront some rather deep neuroses that lie at the heart of me, and perhaps most people whose chosen profession/ passion/ hobby comes from enjoying and commentating on art. I love cinema and I love discussing and writing about cinema. When I write, I like to feed my ego by thinking that I am, in some way, shedding some insight into the topic and perhaps occasionally I or others do just that. However, cinema is cinema, and frankly it doesn’t need me or anybody else to unlock it for anyone. Nobody needs me to tell them why they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy a certain film, they just did, and that’s much, much more important then any theoretical or philosophical baggage I might want to throw at something to make me sound smart. Ultimately, I can write as many words it is possible to write about a film and I will have still said nothing truly valuable about it. Not really. Cinema, literature, or any art form one wishes to focus on, possess that a certain, indefinable core that makes it special, makes it worth commenting on, makes it art in the first place. Nobody can say or explain what that is, you just feel it and know it in your heart, I guess in some way like some people feel God or fate or karma. To close on another quotation, this time from the mouth of Anton Ego from the glorious Ratatouille (which frankly says everything I just tried to say with talking rats, so perhaps you should just watch that if you remain a bit lost): “The bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful then our criticism designating it so.”
I hope these musings explains my lack of entrees and why perhaps also why, on occasion, months and months will go by before I even update this blog. I sometimes find it hard to write about cinema knowing this, believing this. But, ultimately, I also find this knowledge quite liberating: Nothing I can possibly do will fulfil the requirement of explaining cinema, so it doesn’t really matter what I write. All I can hope is that my words get somewhere close to explain the magic of the moving image. With this in mind, I have decided a slight change in format to one of my sections. I’ve, in the past, to write about the cinema that has touched me the most and it’s been impossible. The one attempt I published on Pulp Fiction I really wasn't happy with and, as I re-read it, feels incredibly pedestrian and far away from any sense of value. Therefore, I’ve decided to focus instead on individual scenes/ moments I love within films I adore in the hope that by sacrificing an impossible breath I might include a trace of depth. Hopefully, this will bring me that ever-illusive sense of worth I’m craving. I will fail, but I might not fail entirely, and that little nub of ambition is enough to make me want to try.